Market focused directories, such as ThomasNet® and Sweets Network® are popular advertising venues for manufacturers and service providers. Advertisers listed in these directories may receive general information about user activity on their sites, for example, how often the sites are accessed, but such information is not always of much value because it does not tell the advertiser enough about the actual users. The market focused directory companies can describe the users as a high-quality, focused audience, but before now there has been little concrete data to back up the claims. Accordingly, a method to compile data on particular users and correlate it with user activity would be beneficial to the directory companies and the advertisers listed in their directories.
The concept of implicit measures, such as durations has been used to evaluate Internet advertising. Previously durations have been used by accumulating data from general searches on the Internet. The quality of such data can be poor because the users whose activity is being evaluated or measured may not be a high quality, focused group. Poor quality of the user being evaluated translates to poor quality advertising analysis. Accordingly a better pool of users needs to be tapped to improve the quality of the resulting Internet advertising evaluation.